Prototypes

Creator said:
How about Steam.....! O_O
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Next it will be mist :) (nb if you don't get this head over to the FF thread and ask about thier mist powered airships!)

Seriously though steam could never be kept as steam - it would most likley condence - also the boiling point of water changes with changes in pressure as well.
 
LOL
steam cigar boat

Steam land torpedo??

Um helium is rare on this planet but elsewhere it may well exist in huge quantities.:rolleyes:
Hydrogen which is exceptionally common could be used - and is lighter RMM = 1 - if you could make it flame/heat proof H being exceptionally explosive, perhaps aero gel could come in here?
 
Out of shear interest have you read the Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton -your posts about gases and thier availbility on other planets triggored this semi random quesion
 
Iwas thinking we could go back to hydrogen in dirigibles, if we could make an aerogel skin (light, strong, fireproof and a good enough insulator that if the outside did catch fire it would probably not set off the hydrogen, but it seems the stuff's hydroscopic, like the silica gel it was made from, and would probably get soggy and dissolve in the rain. Still, hydrogen's always going to give the most lift, and it's cheap and easy to produce, so perhaps an outer, waterproof and hydrogen proof (tiny little molecules have a tendency to leak through most substances) coating, and an inner structure of hydrogen gel, like aerogel but replacing the water with hydrogen instead of air, so you don't tend to get leaking gas giving you a localised explosive mixture.

As for personal weapons, how about masers? Microwave cooking at a distance. Relatively high effeciency, invisible (except in fog) and a decent range. Needs a good power pack, though, and anything containing that much potential energy could explode, if conditions were right.
 
No I'm afraid not but it's something thats been put forward as a use of space and a reason for colinisation of other planets etc. Hence my interest.

Hydrogen does have that problem in that as it's so small it's more difficult to contain within membranes. Perhaps the Aerogel could be covered with a waterproof layer of something like....... I don't reall know.
 
I don't understand your 50-50 split. If it's lighter than air, it's lighter than air. If it's heavier, it's heavier. In heavier-than-air vehicles, there is an effort to build them light, but not for buoyancy; as long as it's heavier than air it just won't be buoyant. In lighter-than-air vehicles, there can be different degrees of buoyancy (some vehicles being more buoyant than others), but going for more weight means going for less buoyancy, which has no benefit. Sure, the weight could be because you've added cargo rather than because you've made the vehicle heavier, but if you want to carry so much cargo that it affects the vehicle's weight like that, then heavier-than-air vehicles are the way to go, because you can move so much more stuff so much faster. (And possibly with more fuel efficiency, due to momentum and a sleeker, non-bulbous shape helping you keep going forward and cut through the air instead of constantly having the air push back at your blimp and trying to stop it.)
 
Yah I think the era of airships is gone for good.......

Oh yah lets talk about laser weaponry..... excluding hand-size blasters.....
 
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just to jump in at the end of the airships section, but there are plans to reuse airships again as a tourist attraction, however they have yet to get off the ground (bad pun of the year)
 
Delvo said:
I don't understand your 50-50 split. If it's lighter than air, it's lighter than air. If it's heavier, it's heavier. In heavier-than-air vehicles, there is an effort to build them light, but not for buoyancy; as long as it's heavier than air it just won't be buoyant. In lighter-than-air vehicles, there can be different degrees of buoyancy (some vehicles being more buoyant than others), but going for more weight means going for less buoyancy, which has no benefit. Sure, the weight could be because you've added cargo rather than because you've made the vehicle heavier, but if you want to carry so much cargo that it affects the vehicle's weight like that, then heavier-than-air vehicles are the way to go, because you can move so much more stuff so much faster. (And possibly with more fuel efficiency, due to momentum and a sleeker, non-bulbous shape helping you keep going forward and cut through the air instead of constantly having the air push back at your blimp and trying to stop it.)
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How about a hot hydrogen balloon? Rigid structure, limp envelope contains roughly half the gas needed to inflate it. Start the motor, waste heat expands the hydrogen and the bag becomes smooth and aerodynamic. Turbo-jet engines with minimum of metal (some lightweight ceramics, mostly carbon fibre protected from the heat by aerogel) pushes it forward, adding lift and taking you to the fringes of the stratosphere, where you've got almost no lift left from the gasbag, but friction has dropped down to reasonable levels, too. Low flying satellite hooks onto the top (elastic monofilament, so the shock isn't too excessive) and pulls you up to LEO.
Slowing down (assuming you've not gone through the last sentence) reduced motor power producing less lift drops you into denser atmosphere and the cooling gas (I'm hoping windchill will outweigh frictional heating; we're not going that fast, are we?) gasbag becomes flaccid, and starts generating enormous drag, and less lift. now you're heavier than air again, so don't need to drag the thing down (though not much heavier, and wind is going to complicate this stage considerably)
Hardly supersonic, and on the edge of materials scienge, but quite energy efficient.
 
I think that should work well actually Chris, although not sure about cooling versus frictinal heat generation, which would require some testing.

People use small blimps for advertising -Highly visible, Attract attention, more unusual.
I dont see why small airships, carrying passenger on leisurely low-altitude trips e.g. London-Paris where time is not an essence couldn't function. The advertising potential is far greater than 'planes due to slower speeds increasing the likelihood that people will see them. Thus advertising could be used to offset some startup/operating costs. Although the service would probably be expensive luxury champaigne inclusive. etc type service.
 
chrispenycate said:
How about a hot hydrogen balloon?
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I don’t understand what you’re saying about the gas bag/envelope. Does the vehicle change size by folding up and unfolding? Do you mean for the gas container to be shaped like a giant wing instead of bulbous? Other than the satellite thing, it sounds like you’re describing a heavier-than-air vehicle’s mode of generating lift at all times, so where does the gas come into the picture?

But there were other parts that I can react to...

Having a satellite pull you up means pulling the satellite down... probably down farther than the distance by which you were pulled up, because the satellite is almost always going to be less massive, so you’re either destroying the satellite by dipping it into the air, making it unable to do its job anymore because you’ve shifted its orbit and it’s in the wrong orbit, or required it to be able to compensate by carrying its own fuel and engines (which you must supply for it). And it also means you can only launch at the right time and from the right place on Earth, when and where the satellite is going by. (And I don’t get why it’s needed if the vehicle has its own lift.)

Running a jet in thin air means having to move faster in order for the engine to get enough air, and that higher speed also means the resistance is high despite the air’s thinness, because the whole point in going that fast is to cancel out the air’s thinness so it’s somewhat as if you were down where the air’s thick anyway (for the jet engine). So being in thin air doesn’t get you lower friction unless you’re not going so fast, which means you must be using a propulsion system that doesn’t need to breathe like a jet does.

“Wind chill” doesn’t inherently mean a cooling effect. It means that whatever or heat exchange between something else and the air was going to happen anyway happens faster than it would in still air. We normally experience that as a chill because the normal energy flow is out from our bodies into our surroundings. If you were someplace that the air was hot enough to reverse that normal direction of flow (the limit for which is something above your body temperature because sweating complicates the story), then wind would feel hot because it would be pushing heat into you faster than still air does, just like wind under more normal circumstances pulls heat out of you faster than still air does. So in your scenario of descending through the troposphere, there would usually (unless you’re going through an inversion) be an overall warming effect because you’re going into warmer air. But you’d have to be moving extremely quickly, far beyond “dropping like a rock” even, for friction and bow shock to create the kind of dangerous heat levels you get from re-entry from space, so it’s not a problem for high-altitude airplanes or balloons.
 
Creator said:
Yah I think the era of airships is gone for good.......

Oh yah lets talk about laser weaponry..... excluding hand-size blasters...
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Well, none have been made that are considered usable yet, mainly because of two things:
1. The energy requirements for producing beams with enough power, especially repeatedly or for long duration, and the size and weight of the machinery to produce such powerful beams.
2. The lack of targets that could be hit this way but couldn't just as well be hit by missiles/bombs/bullets/knifes/clubs.

The first places they'd likely to become operational are bases on the land and ships on the surface of the water. The size and weight of the equipment isn't such a problem there, and they could be used to protect those big sitting targets against incoming missiles and enemy aircraft. Using them against missiles, in particular, might be perfect for their power issues, since shooting such a small object doesn't take as much power as shooting a bigger one (or one with more armor). It would also take advantage of one big superiority they have over projectile weapons: instantaneous delivery with no chance of missing or being dodged.

At least one has also been built into a modified cargo plane for testing and development. Other than pure research, I don't know the reason for this; it could only be fired from visual range, which is shorter than the range from which missiles can be fired, and the same plane can deliver more firepower in conventional explosives than its laser generator power source can store. Maybe they expect to develop a power supply system that can contain and put out enough energy to exceed the firepower of an equivalent weight/volume of conventional explosives, or maybe they see some tactical use for a weapon that cuts/heats/vaporizes/melts/burns targets instead of blowing them up, or maybe they're interested in lasers because those wouldn't give away the shooter's position when fired (because you can't see the beams in real life).

If reduced in size enough from there, one could instead be carried by a truck, making the kind of base-defense system I mentioned earlier somewhat more portable to defend other locations, or perhaps allowing them to be used on buildings by sneaking the laser into position on a harmless-looking vehicle. This reminds me of the fact that a big (non-disguisable) maser system has already been desigend for HMMWVs with the goal of dispersing crowds without killing. A similar-sized laser machine could also be light enough for carry by a fighter plane or some helicopters, but you'd have to take out something else important to make it fit the size and shape, and then you'd be increasing the vehicle's "dead weight", thus shortening its range and/or making it harder to fly.

No fighter or helicopter has been designed with a good place to fit the extra burden, except the F-35 light fighter jet, and even there it's essentially a coincidence. One of the design requirements was that at least one version of it be capable of vertical landings and vertical or very shortened takeoffs. The way this is done in an F-35 is very different from the way it's done in a Harrier; the jet exhaust is in the usual position in the back and normally points straight back for conventional flight, but can swivel down, and behind the cockpit is a powerful fan which points down, so the upward thrust from that in the front balances out the upward thrust from the jet in the rear. Because the "hole" where that fan goes was designed in from the start and the plane was designed to fly carrying dead weight in that spot from the start, it wouldn't be much trouble to put something else in there instead and just have the plane land and launch in the conventional way. And because the fan is powered (through gears and a clutch) by the jet engine through a spinning shaft that sticks forward from the jet engine into the fan's compartment, anything else you put in there would also have access to the same shaft, which can create 20 megawatts of electricity if used as a generator. However, they're not saying much publicly about their progress toward actually putting a usable laser device in there or even efforts to come up with one; it's just an intriguing possibility that's been raised.
 
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Hmmm maybe several turrets on board a super-sized concorde will make an airborne aircraft carrier pack more punch.
 
But hey is it possible to create a supersonic aerial aircraft carrier.?

and about lasers.... I am thinking maybe MAsers would be more possible.

220px-Active_Denial_System_Humvee.jpg

Active Denial System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Creator said:
But hey is it possible to create a supersonic aerial aircraft carrier.?
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No. Too much mass to move and not enough power to move it... and no point in trying anyway because it wouldn't accomplish goal we can't reach already.

If it were to become possible to move such massive objects around at will with reasonable amounts of energy, it would require propulsion technology that isn't even theorized about right now (aside from gravitomagnetism, which most physicists don't agree with), and its best applications would still be for something else other than airborne aircraft carriers, like building vehicles that can go into space much more quickly and easily than today's rockets (possibly including really big ones) and making smaller in-atmosphere vehicles go faster and farther between two points on the Earth's surface. Aircraft carriers floating around in the air would be pointless because smaller vehicles could (as they pretty much already can) go the whole distance they needed to go without needing any stops along the way.
 
Maybe the zepplin-type aircraft carriers might be a little slow but what's a zepplin's top speed?
 
Creator said:
what's a zepplin's top speed?
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Between 10 and 20 MPH.

I saw an article in a weapons magazine a few days ago about a less-than-lethal (or "less-lethal") weapon that is being developed. It was a projectile, like a slug fired from a shotgun, which would deliever an electrical shock on impact. And it wasn't attached to the gun by wires, so there was no need to wind it back in and nothing to keep the shooter from firing another shot at the same or another target. It reminded me of tranquilizer darts. The catch with both is dosage; the same amount of electricity or sedative could have the intended effect on one person, kill another, and not be effective enough on another. If a way to control dosages more effectively were developed, or a sedative were found that's harmless in higher dosages, that would make either one of these things practically like Star Trek's phasers on "stun" setting, without the light show. (Tranqulizer darts are much more usable with other animal species because there's a chemical that's pretty safe for them at high dosages, making the margin of error for calculating dosage much wider. Unfortunately, that chemical doesn't have quite the same effect on humans that it does on other animals; it's PCP!)

And if a sedative gas were found that was harmless at high concentrations, then clouds of that could safely be used for sedating crowds of people all at once. Truck-mounted maser devices can disperse crowds by making them feel like they're burning even though they're not being harmed, but sedating them with a gas would involve no pain and they'd stay where they were instead of running off in various directions. Another way they've thought of to deal with large crowds without harming them is with infrasonic sound (too low-pitched to hear, but you'd feel it in your guts), which can theoretically cause pain or make people feel ill. None of these have been perfected to do the intended job yet, but they might be sometime.
 
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